[kevingadd]

CA's political stance is basically irrelevant here, they're mercenaries. "Liberal" companies of this stripe would easily do the same thing if given the opportunity. The sort of work they do is intrinsically compromising unless your business is operating with a very firm moral/ethical code and it really hinders your ability to chase opportunities and maximize revenues.

It's not a coincidence that Google ditched 'don't be evil', and doing that doesn't indicate a twist to the far right or anything of the sort: It's just the reality that being a wildly profitable advertising firm can require a lot of moral/ethical flexibility that leads to outcomes like what we have here with CA & SCL.

The significance of CA's politics is specifically that they gave their services for free to a political campaign that aligned with their goals, which is already of questionable legality - and in this case, likely expected and possibly already received regulatory kickbacks in exchange. But that doesn't really matter in the context of FB deciding to enforce rules.

EDIT: To clarify, Trump's campaign did pay CA but sources have claimed that they received a deep discount.

[hedora]

Naming a liberal-leaning political consultancy that is this slimy would help. (The DNC’s behavior during the primaries comes to mind, in fairness to your argument)

[stevenwoo]

I would say the DNC is not very liberal, it's more corporatist/neoliberal, which is not progressive at all. And their reach/tech is pretty low tech.

[stevenwoo]

Can you name a liberal company equivalent? I'm having trouble coming up with anything close to this sort of behavior except maybe the Russians pretending to be liberals to rile up Americans as part of an equal opportunity rile up Americans of all political stripes campaign.

[rvo]

FB and Google are huge companies and control majority of the information people get today. We should want them to be moral arbiters. Otherwise what else can we do? Most of us are so gullible.

[twblalock]

We should absolutely not want corporations to be arbiters of morality.

[mwfunk]

No, of course not, but like everything, it's a spectrum. I wouldn't want a big corporation like FB to play a meaningful role in deciding what is and what is not moral (or factual), but at the same time I don't want FB to be a trivially manipulated medium for targeted disinformation and divisive propaganda. For example, a hostile state actor doing things like showing white rural retirees ads for fictional BLM recruitment drives to stoke fear/hatred/misunderstanding among the US population.

A completely hands-off approach is also corrosive and destructive. They're stuck trying to thread the needle, to balance civic responsibility while avoiding being an overbearing gatekeeper. I don't think it's possible to pull it off in such a way that they are not overstepping bounds in one direction or another, but as long as the pros outweigh the cons of whatever approach they take, it'd still be infinitely better than doing nothing.